With the developing of wireless communication technology, mobile phones have become increasingly popular. However, as mobile phones have become more prevalent throughout the world, phone frauds or scams have become a major problem. Mobile phone frauds or scams steal hundreds of millions of dollars every year from carriers and mobile phone users. Like all crimes, there are many different kinds of frauds or scams.
For example, the telemarketing cold calls prospective clients and promises for a fee that they would collect their business debts. They just try to con the clients. Sometimes, the con was successful.
Currently, most fraud or scam detecting systems monitor inbound calls by their many features, such as suspect numbers, risk factors, and thresholds. A threshold normally is which, when exceeded, indicates possible fraud.
Suspect numbers are normally the caller's phone numbers which match the numbers in a called blacklist. If fraud is suspected, the fraud detecting systems will notify the users or receivers and suggest appropriate actions to stop the frauds or scams.
Fraudulent telemarketers also pose often as calling on behalf of charities. They then ask for the victims to make a donation to the charities over the phones. The criminal then takes the credit card information and makes unauthorized purchases with it.
Frequent victims of telemarketing scams include the poor, the elderly, and immigrants without strong English skills.
Criminals also frequently use pyramid schemes over the phone. A pyramid scheme requires the victim to pay an initial sum of money and is promised in return to receive sums of money from a number of different people that will exponentially increase the initial investment. While those that join the scheme in the beginning may profit, those at the bottom of the scheme who cannot find any followers will receive no such return.
Normal telemarketing, sometimes known as inside sales or telesales, is a method of direct marketing over phones. Sometimes, salespersons try to sell unnecessary, useless or overpriced products or services to their customers. Although these normal telemarketing sales are not frauds or scams, they really bother people a lot and cause many problems or issues.
Internet-powered phone systems have made it cheap and easy for scammers to make illegal sales robocalls from anywhere in the world. It also lets them hide from law enforcement by displaying fake caller ID information.